1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the maintenance and management of equipment for production operations, and more particularly, to a maintenance and management method and a maintenance and management support system for the management by an operator for production operations using maintenance and management data that have been collected by an original method.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Conventionally, inspections, maintenance and operation of production machinery for the production industry are mostly based on proprietary manuals on the production machinery, and after having installed the production machinery into the production line, inspection and maintenance become problematic due to the interaction with other machinery. As there is no clear guidance on how to deal with this problem, and furthermore, the level of knowledge and maintenance skills of each operator regarding the production machinery differ, maintenance and management of equipment is often handled by repeated trial and error.
Furthermore, often a corrective maintenance approach is taken (i.e. maintenance is carried out only after an accident or a defect has occurred), without active maintenance and management and without setting clear maintenance periods for the production machinery. Therefore, the operators do not subject the production machinery to measures that have to be taken in the natural course of events, which leads to an acceleration of the deterioration of the devices due to deterioration (hereinafter, referred to as xe2x80x9cforced deteriorationxe2x80x9d), thereby resulting in a shortened service life.
It is a first object of the present invention to prevent the conventional repeating of trial and error, to let operators of any level of knowledge and maintenance skills accurately grasp defects regarding the equipment, and standardize the skill level of operators.
It is a second object to make the maintenance, management and operation of equipment easy, fast and reliable, as well as to switch the forced deterioration of equipment to a deterioration occurring in line even with basic conditions (cleaning, lubrication and retightening) and even under correct usage (hereinafter, referred to as xe2x80x9cnatural deteriorationxe2x80x9d), and keep up this natural deterioration.
As described below, the first object is attained by performing maintenance and management comprising obtaining defect frequency data and inspection data that are divided by importance of the level of defect of the production machinery (i.e., depending on how serious the level of the defect of the production machinery is), after obtaining machinery defect data by letting randomly sampled operators using equipment inspect a series of production machines and carrying out countermeasures and inspection based on these data, and repeating an overall inspection based on the defect frequency data until the defect frequency data for all defect locations have been lowered to a standard value, then producing operating standards data based on these inspection data, and individually feeding back the operating standards data to each operator.
In order to perform the above-stated method even faster, there is provided a maintenance and management support system of equipment for production operations comprising a means for storing machinery component defect data that has been obtained by inspecting the equipment in a storage device using an input device, a means for additionally storing in the storage device result data of countermeasures performed based on these machinery component defect data, a means for additionally storing in the storage device inspection standards data and defect frequency data obtained thereafter by inspection, a means for performing a countermeasure on locations with high defect frequency that have been obtained from the defect frequency data, and repeatedly performing an overall inspection until the defect frequency parameters of all locations have been lowered to a standard value, and a means for individually feeding back the stored inspection standards data to each operator by outputting them from the storage device via a processing device as operating standards data on an output device.